ANCHORING GERMANY TO THE WEST: ADENAUER’S HEIRS

Welcome to A Better Peace, podcast of the U.S. Army War College official online journal War Room, graciously supported by the Army War College Foundation. Please join the conversation at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. We hope you enjoy the program. The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of War. Make sure not to miss a single episode and subscribe to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast at warroom.armywarcollege.edu forward slash subscribe. Welcome to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast. I'm Yadviga Biskupska, and I'm currently the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair in Military History. And I'm your host today. It's a pleasure to have you with us. I'm speaking today with the chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy, Dr. Ronald J. Grigneri. And we're going to be talking about his brand new book with Oxford University Press titled Adenauer's Heirs, the CDU and CSU from detente to reunification. Welcome, Ron. Thank you, Yaja. It's nice to be here. You're usually on the other side of the table. I have been known to be here. So do not adjust your set if you're listening to this podcast wondering why Grineri is the guest and not the host. Well, I have some pointed questions for you about your new book. And the first one is perhaps the biggest one is where did this come from? You've been writing about this since Francis Fukuyama said that history ended, but you found some more history. It's funny how we continued to make history. But yes, this is essentially the follow-on volume in a series that I've been working on about West German politics and diplomacy after the Second World War through the lens of the governing parties of the Federal Republic for most of its history, the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union. And especially a figure who looms large on the cover of the book and in the text is Konrad Adenauer, who was the first chancellor of West Germany. He was the chair of the CDU and he was chancellor from 1949 till 1963. And he was actually chair of the party all the way till 1966. And he set the foundations of the party, but also of German West German foreign policy. And so his successors profited from and struggled with his legacy. Okay. That's a big topic. This is a big, big field. German history, Cold War history, militarism. There's a lot of things you touch on in this book. So staking your credentials here as a historian, as a senior scholar in the field, what have previous historians of the Cold War of West Germany gotten wrong? What do you have in this book that's new for the first time about Adenauer and about his legacy? I mean, I think a couple of things is that the history of Cold War Germany was written largely during the Cold War when Germany was divided. And a lot of the main historiographical debates were about questions of whose fault is it that Germany is divided and is going to be divided forever. For example, when I first started doing research on this stuff in the early 1990s, reunification had just happened, but the debates were still stuck in this idea. And it was very political in the sense that supporters of Odenauer argued that Odenauer created a democratic Germany, and then the left-wing governments of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the 70s had given up on German reunification, and that's why Germany was divided. Whereas the other historian said, no, actually, it's Adenauer's fault that Germany was divided because he didn't want German reunification when he established or helped to establish the Federal Republic. And those kinds of debates had gotten very virulent and very stale. And then right after reunification, the first wave of historians were, my guy is the reason why Germany was unified. No, my guy was the reason why Germany was unified. I have the sort of, to borrow from John Gaddis, my tragic view of history, right, my post-revisionist view is, you know, it's a breath mint and a candy mint, right, that Germany doesn't get reunified if the Federal Republic of Germany does not succeed in establishing a record as a reliable democratic state that is willing to work with its European neighbors. And Adenauer, with his vision of Westbindung, of tying West Germany to the West, was essential to that because that's what allows the federal public to show its most immediate neighbor, France, and its other European neighbors and the United States that Germany could be relied upon to help with European security. And while it is true that that meant that West Germany joins NATO and Adenauer rejected the idea of neutrality and unification, which may never have been an actually realistic choice to begin with. But there were moments when Austria, for example, is reunified in 1955. Some people said, why can't we do this for Germany? And Adenauer's belief was, well, Austria is a tiny country of minor geopolitical significance, and Germany was simply too big. But be that as it may, you don't get Germany's neighbors to appreciate Germany's contribution of stability without Adenauer's contributions to European integration and NATO. In the same way that a generation later with Ostpolitik, right, that it did require the Brandt government and the Schmidt government to show that they were willing to make peace with their Eastern neighbors. So in the sense, I don't think you see reunification without both of those things. You need them both. But at the same time, what is interesting is the unification that did come was essentially the unification that Adenauer promised. Not exactly how he promised it, not exactly when he promised it, because he was always very cagey on when it was going to happen. But the idea that reunified Germany is essentially, for better or worse, an expanded version of the Federal Republic of Germany. It's got the same constitutional order. It's got largely the same political parties. It is embedded in the institutions of the European Union and NATO that the Federal Republic was embedded in, right? That we didn't get reunification through neutrality. We didn't get reunification through West Germany or through Germany forsaking its previous commitments. That essentially we got the success story of the Federal Republic then was extended to include the former East Germany. Now, my book's not about Germany post-unification, and there are lots of questions about how the people of the former East feel about this. But I don't think we can understand the political structure or even the basic orientation of contemporary Germany without realizing that it is an extension of the republic that Adnauer helped to create. Okay. Okay. I'm going to grant you that. but there's a lot there, and I'm going to pull at some of those threads. We're going to talk about Gattis, and we're going to talk about, I think, you're uniquely well-placed to explain the frontiers between political science and history when something becomes historical, and then, of course, the deep background of the current situation. This book is extraordinarily timely, for those of you who haven't read it yet. The questions that Adenauer, that Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl are investigating in this book are very much the questions that Germans and members of the EU and NATO are discussing today. So let's start with, well, let me start with a basic question to see how you want to tackle this is we talk about reunification. This is a book that essentially its introduction is about the end of the Second World War, though it really warms up in the 1960s when Konrad Adenauer leaves unhappily the political stage in Germany, and then it ends with reunification. So the telos of this book is a reunified Germany. But some of our listeners today might just regard that as an uninteresting detail of the past. Why was reunification important? Was it a good thing? And for whom? Well, man, yes. I like a good basic question, right? Was reunification a good thing? Yes. Okay. But I think it is important for people to understand. And I'm sitting here. People can look up and find out how old I actually am. But let's just say I'm old enough to have graduated from high school when Helmut Kohl was chancellor in the 1980s. You could turn on the TV yourself when the Berlin Wall fell. And I had graduated from college in the spring of 1989 when I was living in Heidelberg, Germany, in the fall of 1989 when Germany was reunified. So you were a direct witness of these historical, now historical. Oddly enough. Yeah, oddly enough. Yes. And this is a, you know, there's all kinds of stories connected to that, which I'll save for another time. But what is worth noting is I can remember in the summer of 1989, at a time when there was a great deal of relaxation of tensions between the East and West. Mikhail Gorbachev actually, and I write about this in the book, in the spring of 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union makes a very well-publicized, very popular, very positive visit to West Germany. And there was an overall sense that the Cold War was over in the sense that Gorbachev's reforms and the arms control agreements with the United States and a bunch of other things suggested that we were entering into a new era. But at that moment in the summer of 1989, nobody thought that that meant the end of communism in Eastern Europe, right? A lot of people would pretend afterwards to say that they saw it coming. And basically anybody who tells you that is lying to you because nobody expected it. And indeed, there was still a great deal of fear. I remember when I arrived in Germany in the summer of 1989, one of the first things I did was go to a bookstore and bought a recently published popular history of Germany called From Bismarck to Hitler by Sebastian Hoffner, who was very famous Anglo-German commentator. And that book literally ends with a passage where he says the Germans need to give up on the idea of reunification because the two German states are simply they're too important to their superpower patrons for either one to let their Germany go and that any call for reunification will only end in tears that no one wants. So the idea was as late as the summer of 1989 people still view German unification as something that was just not going to happen And then it did And so while my book traces the discussions that happened in West German politics leading up through unification it has a great deal of discussion about that crisis, 1989, 1990. I would just say that people need to understand that people thought that Germany was going to be divided forever. I mean, heck, I remember taking German lessons in college in a textbook that had separate chapters on various German-speaking countries. And so it had a chapter on West Germany, a chapter on Austria, a chapter on Switzerland, a chapter on East Germany, as though, you know, in the same way that Germany, West Germany and Austria, nobody really talked about reunification after 1945. Yeah. Or for example, or that people just assume that East and West Germany would be like the United States and Canada. I'm picturing that. I'm picturing a wall between them. Well, and those are the things about German politics, I think, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that is so interesting is the building of the Berlin Wall, while a lot of people spent a lot of time shaking their fists at what a horrible thing it was, and it was a horrible thing, nobody in the West was going to do a darn thing about it. And indeed, my first book, The Ambivalent Alliance, actually talks a little bit about the Kennedy administration's reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall, which was more, oh, good, I think we've resolved the problem of refugees from the east. But from that point on then, the wall was considered, and this I think is so weird, and I think it's probably good that people today think that it's strange that people were okay with the existence of this wall in the middle of a major city in Europe because it was a strange thing to have happen. But it is worth remembering that people simply took it as a necessary element of global stability. Until it wasn't. Until it wasn't, right? And so this is why when I think about West German politics and West German foreign policy, the question for, you know, my work is largely about West Germany, right? And I make no apologies for this. Other people can write great histories of East Germany and they're welcome to do so. But what's interesting is that the West Germans operated in a sort of mental universe where they imagined that they were operating for Germany as a whole, because according to international law, that's what they were doing. They were the Germans. They were the Germans. And so when they made the decisions that this Federal Republic of Germany would be the democratic state that it was, that it would participate enthusiastically in European integration, that it would cooperate in Western defense, right? All of this was with an eye towards creating a successful, stable German state that was trusted by its neighbors. And why would that be so important? That would be important because the Germans had spent the first half of the 20th century not being— Abusing the trust. Let's say abusing the trust of their neighbors. That's right. And so it makes a great deal of difference. And it is worth noting that, as you hinted at in your earlier question, that in the 1960s already, the questions that the West Germans were asking about things were, you know, what should our relationship be to the rest of Germany? what is the end point of European integration? What should be the nature of our relationship with the United States? Those three questions, which one of the opening scenes of my book is a meeting in 1962 talking about those things. Those three questions are the three questions that Germans and Europeans are wrestling with today. And perhaps that shows these are questions that can't be answered. I would argue that it just shows that these are fundamental or existential questions for the Germans. And now that the Cold War is over, so to speak, and now that the wall is gone, right, so the unification question has been resolved. But the question of the relationship between the former East and the former West continues to be very virulent, especially because it is in the former East that you have a very strong populist party that is hostile to European integration, hostile to the alliance with the United States, hostile to West Germany, is now become an important factor in politics. So the Germans still have to wrestle with that question. The question of the future of the European Union, as early as the 1960s when the sort of the economic stuff had already carried on, I think one of the big myths that people will interject into discussions of the European Union, two big myths, I'll say, especially in English-speaking world, but even in Europe. One of them is the myth that the European Union was a left-wing project. The other one is the myth that the European Union was initially just an economic project. Right. When neither one of those things is true, and this gets to because the founders of the European Union, especially in Germany and France and Italy, were Christian Democrats. And this was a political movement that was rooted in Catholic social teaching and a Christian vision of individual personhood and concepts of freedom and concepts of Western civilization. they imagined that European integration was to save Western civilization, to stabilize it after two world wars, after nationalism had showed itself to be such a destructive force that the goal should be some kind of European solidarity. This is not a left-wing idea. It was a very conservative idea. And while economics was considered to be one of the sort of the angles that was going to bring people together, the goal all along was some kind of political union. The shape and size of that union was open to question, still is open to question, but that when we try to understand Europe today, we have to understand that it was founded on these principles. And while other political movements, socialists, liberals, greens would also make their contribution to Europe, that they made it within this idea of European integration, and especially with German participation as central to it. Because a Europe without Germany as part of it would be weak and would be threatened by this Germany that was outside. And similarly, a Germany that was not making a contribution to Europe would be viewed as a threat by its neighbors. And so this, you know, Germany is a central part of this European project. And Adenauer, that was his outlook. And that's what the CDU as a political party has generally been the party of, a closer European cooperation within this concept of the West. Okay. So we have here, and one of the things you've been underscoring is it's very easy to lose track of the roots of things, especially complex phenomenon. Even as they appear familiar, it's easy right now for figures in the Anglosphere to pigeonhole the EU as one kind of institution when, in fact, if you know its trajectory, if you know its development, it's another. So let's pivot to thinking about that as historians. We're professional historians or somewhat professional historians. And operating under the assumption that history has quite a lot to offer the present. And in fact, when you remove it, its absence becomes – it not only makes things rather two-dimensional, I think in this field, it clearly makes them a bit dangerous, not having that. So let's talk a little bit about the history, and then let's talk about the backstory of the history of the present. So you brought up John Lewis Gaddis, the Don of Cold War history. You're a Cold War historian as well as a historian of foreign policy, a historian of West Germany, a historian of Christian democracy. And in my lifetime, and in your lifetime, you moved from essentially, don't take this the wrong way, a political scientist to a historian. You were starting with the history of the present. But Cold War history and those studying it have pivoted in a really substantial way, maybe since the end of the Cold War, maybe in the last 10 years. And I would say, if you think this is fair, they're really no longer interested in the West. They're no longer interested in Europe. That's not the main place that the research on the Cold War is being conducted. I like the idea that this is an increasingly global project, but I think that we lose something by not paying attention to the European continent. So as a historian of the Cold War, could you give me one or two key things that we still need to study and understand about Europe in the Cold War in order to understand the entire Cold War? Just one or two. Just one or two. I'm sorry, because I'm so glad you asked this question, because it is true that when I started my graduate student life in the early 1990s, to be a historian of Germany probably meant history ended around 1945. and I was one of the first members of my department to pick a topic that was after 1945. That it was about the present. That it was essentially the present. And so I've been dealing with this issue of, and that's why I like the German concept of Zeitgeschichte, right? Which ironically I discovered that people started using that term, which literally sort of means history of our times. They started saying that in 1918 about studying the First World War because you're talking about the history of things that are influencing us right now. And for a long time, right, Zeitgeschichte in Germany was the Nazis. And so – but I feel like to understand the trajectory of Europe during the Cold War is very important because it's not just about what the United States wants or what the United States does or even what the United States and the Soviet Union do. is that the idea that individual European states, and there's been great work, Will Hitchcock, Mike Cresswell have done some great work on France during the Cold War period, and there's great work on the UK, that individual European states, especially in the West, and this is why I think the focus on the West is very important, is because states in the West did have a degree of autonomy, even as allies of the United States, a degree of autonomy that the states of Eastern Europe did not have, that the Europeans played a role in shaping the world of Cold War Europe. It was not simply imposed by the United States. And so one big thing is I think we need to look at those questions. And I would argue one of the things I, when I wrote, I published an essay back in 2009 that was the beginning thoughts that eventually grew into this book. And one of the points that I make in it is that so much of German history and Cold War history was built around this question Who's responsible for German division or, you know, which side was right in the Cold War? And for the European perspective, I think the story of how did the European states develop their cooperation with each other, right? So not just the – especially the creation of the European Union, but just in general. That's a more important story really because it doesn't matter anymore to a certain extent. I mean outside of it, it's interesting, but, you know, that we're not living in a divided Europe. And so right now there this this ongoing question of how the Europeans should cooperate with each other which began when Europe was divided but continues This is a question of a different quality than a purely historical question of you know why did the Berlin Wall get built Because you asked me about being a political scientist I did Right And what I find is that while political scientists study the European Union they manage to drain all of the drama out of the story of the European Union It also doesn't have a lot of contingency. It doesn't have a lot of contingency. It's just the telos is European unity and it's just the how. And the how. And they talk about structures and they talk about processes. When the idea that Germany and France since 1945 have gone from 300 years of fighting each other to now being main partners in developing this institution, which until very recently allowed Europe to enjoy its longest period of uninterrupted peace in its history. Until recently. Until recently, when an outside force acted upon. This is a great and dramatic story. And yet historians don't cover it enough. Political scientists cover it in the way that is least interesting to anybody who is not a fellow political scientist. This is also like the story of German recovery from 1945, the development of German democracy. German history continues to be dominated in the public mind by the terrible things that Germany did in the first half of the 20th century. And this is important for us to understand in Germany. Absolutely. We do not spend enough time studying successful democracies. Right. We study war. We study failure. We don't always study war as failure. But when things succeed, we take it for granted. That's right. And so that's why my studying, talking about Adenauer, talking about Helmut Kohl, these are democratic politicians who were not necessarily dynamic speakers or dynamic individuals, but they built and organized and ran successful democracy in a country that before 1945 people didn't think democracy was possible. We forget that. It was the first successful German democracy, but it was not the first German attempt at democracy. I mean, Adenauer is chancellor from 1949 to 1963. That's 14 years. That's the entire length of the Weimar Republic. I think he did it better. And he did it better when he handed off, you know, he handed off to Ludwig Erhard, right? And so that's why these are the kinds of questions I think are interesting that I think from a Cold War perspective. And I remember years ago being at a job talk and was asked this question about Cold War history. And even this was in the early 2000s. A different world. A different world. A different world. But at that point, people talked about there was the new Cold War history and there were these new institutions. And at that point, I said, what struck me is so many of the new stuff, it was either the history of Eastern Europe, which was a new and growing field because people could get to the archives, or it was the global stuff, which is also new and very interesting, but that there was very little work being done about Cold War Western Europe. And part of it maybe was a sense of, well, we studied Western Europe all this time. We've got to study the other parts of the world. I'm not going to disagree, right, that other parts of the world need to be studied. But I don't think our understanding of the Cold War is – it's not like we can say, well, we completely understand what happened in Western Europe. I would submit that somebody who reads my book will discover things about debates going on in Germany in the 1960s that were actually pretty important at the time but have not been adequately integrated into our historical understanding of the period. I mean, it's a sin of historians, but it's also an opportunity for historians is we tend to think we know a lot of things that as it turns out, we don't know that well. And of course, it's easy, right? The other sin of historians is always to say, hey, it was more complicated than that. Let me make it more complicated for you. Sometimes it's pretty simple. Last chapter of this book goes very fast. We go from two Germanys to one Germany in a twinkling. Okay, so to clarify there, just to sort of buttonhole you, would you be comfortable in saying that the Western European state, so let's say Germany and France for the sake of argument, that during the Cold War, they have more agency, not than the United States and the Soviet Union. We're going to put them in one category, but more agency than the states and aspiring states of the developing world. Yes. Okay. Yes. So we just pin that down there, that position. Okay. Let's talk about another thread that goes through this. And there are a number of them. We could talk about denazification. Let's talk about the quality of normalization, Because one of the things in the background of this book is that Adenauer and those who take on his project of building a West Germany in Europe that's viable are trying to turn their state and their society from something that is very much not normal into something that's normal. So it's a question of building sovereignty, which is a term that comes up a lot and has become more of a slogan than something useful. One of the ways they need to do that or want to do that is they are attempting to make West Germany a state that can defend itself. So the question of defense and, dear God, rearmament overhangs this. And that's a question we're talking about, again, at the beginning of 2026. So where are the soldiers and the weapons and the nuclear missiles in this book? How does Germany become a project, an occupied space, and then go from that to a state with an army? Yeah. I mean, it's important to understand that, and this is something that, well, Adenauer himself had no particular interest in military things per se. He was, beginning in the 1950s, very clear with that if West Germany wanted to be respected by and trusted by its neighbors, that the Germans needed to show that they were willing and able to contribute to Western security. To pull their weight. To pull their weight. And so this is why he is willing. And the West Germans, they allow themselves to be shaped by what their partners want. When it looked like their partners wanted a completely integrated multinational army, the Germans were in favor of that. But as soon as their partners abandoned that and said, we just want a German army that's willing to accept certain restrictions, so NATO command and no nuclear weapons, the West Germans said, we're willing to do that. And that this was very much connected to the general project of stabilizing West Germany by providing its security against the East. There was for a while in the 50s real concern, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War, of possible war. But even when the immediate threat of war went away, there was just the idea that the Germans needed to show their partners that they were willing to cooperate. The question always was, is the restrictions that were placed on Germany, which initially there were, is how do the Germans work within those structures? And what happens when their partners start to say, we'd like you to do more? And this already was happening in the 60s because after – by the mid-60s, economically, West Germany has recovered substantially and is a very wealthy country. And this is a point at which people are starting to ask themselves, right, should Germany – what role should the United States play in defending West Germany, for example? And what role should NATO play? And what role should Germany play? And the conundrum was always, right, the Americans might say and the other Europeans might say that we want the Germans to do more. But they would also say, but we don't want you to have nuclear weapons and we don't really want you to be in charge of anything. We just want you to do more. And the German response would be more. And there were different ways the Germans did more. The Germans, for example, would buy lots of American military equipment, even more than they needed in order to help the Americans balance their payments because of the expenses of American stationing troops in Germany. And the Germans in the 1960s promised not to exchange their massive dollar hoards for gold, even though they could have. This was a promise the Germans explicitly make in 1967. So like the idea is the Germans are doing various things. But the problem always was going to be what happens when, if the Americans are serious about wanting to reduce their commitment in Europe, they want the Europeans to do more. And the question is always, what Europeans and what counts as more? And beginning in the 1960s, and I talk about this in the book, right, former defense minister Franz Josef Strauss was very big in saying that the Europeans needed to think about what it would mean to have their own nuclear deterrent. And because the French and the British had national deterrence, but they were pretty small. But that a unified Europe with a unified defense ministry, with a unified defense strategy could conceivably make a substantial contribution to the defense of the continent on their own. And yet the Americans weren't so sure they wanted that by the late 1960s when they were pursuing arms control with the Soviets, right? More nuclear weapons was not great. And so that's why I have a whole chapter talking about nuclear weapons, talking about the multilateral force and the nonproliferation treaty. And so this was a problem during the Cold War. And so sadly, like I think the good and the bad thing, I think, if somebody reads my book is the one thing is, hey, these aren't completely new questions. That's a little depressing because it means we didn't answer them in the 60s. But the good news is just to say that there are plenty of ideas out there for how the Europeans could contribute more to defense, contribute more to their security and how the Germans as the wealthiest state on the continent, how the Germans could lead the way in that. But the only way that's going to happen is if the Germans are serious about living up to their responsibilities and if the Americans are serious about letting the Europeans do more. Okay. Okay. Let me clarify that for – many of your examples are coming from the 1960s, from the particular chapter in the book where you delve into the question of – gives us the background for green movement and anti-nuclear movement in Germany is why West Germany doesn't have nuclear weapons. But we're at the beginning of 2026 and we're seeing the same iterations that why aren't the Germans pulling their weight? What should the German contribution be to NATO, to European defense? For those who are reading those headlines now, what do you want them to know about this past that they don't? Yeah. I mean, I think what I want them to know about this past is that there have been Germans who have been within the context of the West, within the context of NATO, within the context of a broader sense of European solidarity. There have been Germans who have talked about the need for greater German contributions to security and greater sort of European security action. That the pressures against those things one of the reasons why we are where we are among the reasons we are where we are is sometimes not because of European fecklessness but also because of ambivalence from the superpowers Right that the Americans have not always been so sure they want the Europeans to Get too far off the leash for example Or when the Americans and the Soviets were more interested in detente and in reducing tensions that they one of the interesting paradoxes is that while detente in the 70s is considered to be this period of greater international relaxation of tensions it required pretty serious heavy footing by the superpowers on their people and to say the United States and the Soviet Union are going to be responsible for global security. So no, you can't have these weapons of your own because we're busy controlling them. And that this, I think, is for Americans in particular who want to assume that somehow, right, the Europeans haven't done anything because the Europeans are – or only because the Europeans are weak or spineless, need to understand that there were points where the Europeans wanted to go forward and it was the Americans who said, no, not now, maybe later. Now, it is later now. And so maybe now. Maybe now. Maybe now. Right. Okay. One thing we haven't talked about that I want you to have the opportunity to weigh in on is the question of German nationalism that runs through this book. And earlier you traced three big questions that underline this book. There were the questions of Adenauer's Germany. There were the questions of Helmut Kohl's Germany. They're the questions of German history. But there's one missing in that three, and that is the German nation, is who are the Germans and what does it mean to be German? And this book in many ways answers that question or it closes that question, but in an elliptical way. So how do your Christian Democrats answer that question? Is that question – is that closed? Is that topic closed? No, I don't think it is. And I think this is an interesting development, right, is that certainly I would argue that in Adenauer's time, ironically, right, The first million or so guest workers come into West Germany by 1960, maybe even by earlier than that. And so now those first waves of guest workers were from southern Europe. Turkey. Even before Turkey, they were Italians and Portuguese and Yugoslavs and then Turks would come too. And so to a certain extent, right, even during Germany's economic growth, right, this is when the first waves of migrants come. Although the Germans kept telling themselves that these were just guest workers and they would go home. When confronted with the reality that they don't go home, right, this has been the problem ever since, right, since the 70s for sure. And for the Christian Democratic political parties who've generally been more culturally conservative, right, there's been a reluctance to change German law when it comes to citizenship. There's been a reluctance to that. But but beginning in the 1990s, after reunification, in part, this is in part as the Germans sort of giving back and showing that they were still serious about about asylum, about being a land of asylum and still serious about these things. The Germans began to show that they were willing to modify their laws. But, and this is what I think is really interesting and a thought to conclude this with, is that it was the government of Angela Merkel, who was a Christian Democrat, still is, still is, right, still is a Christian Democrat, that when faced with a challenge where there were all these migrants who were coming to Europe one way or another, in some cases were already in Europe, but nobody seemed to want to have them, who was willing to have them come to Germany, right, that I think Merkel reflected the CDU's attitude towards migration as it developed, is that she dealt with the immediate crisis by saying, wir schaffen das, we can do this, but almost immediately began negotiating with the Turks to find out how much it would cost in order to stop the flow of migrants. And that's the part that people tend to forget that she did. And right now, the CDU is in an odd position because Now they have a challenger on their right, the Alternative für Deutschland, which is a party partially of the former East Germany. So areas that were not big. But in some cases, these were people who voted CDU in the immediate years after communism, but have drifted away because they think that the CDU is too Western, too European. And the challenge for the CDU right now, which is a challenge for a lot of center right political parties, is you've got a party that's much more conservative and that is emphasizing the migration question. And for the CDU right there saying, well, they're not an open borders party. They believe in some kind of migration control. But how can they do this? can they do it in such a way that will bring voters from the AFD back towards them rather than simply have their own voters say, well, heck, if I want to vote for the party that's going to close borders, I'll vote for them instead. And this is a challenge for a political party that prided itself on having a very wide spectrum, having all the way from sort of seriously left wing sort of Catholic social activists all the way to very conservative, aristocratic business leaders. It's a big time. There's a big tent party, a gigantic tent party. The tent is shrinking as they lose people on both fringes. And the challenge, actually fringes, they're just both sides, right? That the challenge for the CDU is to figure out, you know, how could they modify their positions, their practical positions in such a way that will allow them to win back voters? I mean, there was a time when the CDU got 48, 49, 50 percent of the vote. And now in the most recent in the recent polls, they're getting 26, 27 percent of the vote, which is still the biggest single party, barely. But the German political system has gotten a lot more complicated. Or maybe it's gotten complicated again. It got complicated again. Right. So it's a return to some kind of things that people would have seen earlier in the 20th century. Right. And the thing that simplifies your simplifying force is Christian democracy. Democracy could because it is potentially a very broad-based political movement. But how they – I would submit, right, that how they deal with the question of migration is going to be central to whether they can find a way to win back voters that they're losing. And right now, at least, the government of Friedrich Meretz, of the CDU, he is looking for that right balance between being tough enough to win back people who think the CDU has been too weak, but still be true to the pretty open-minded, let's say, Christian social vision of social solidarity. So a new seesaw to balance. A new seesaw to balance in the world. That question of the German nation is still lively here. I'm going to ask one more question while I have you here. And that is inspired by the historian Neil Ferguson, who often speaks in public. We've returned to the present. Who often speaks, yes. Who often speaks of a new Cold War. Yeah. And we also get comments. I see them sometimes bandied about, even here in the fine halls of the Army War College, about a World War III. Yeah. So as a historian, as an expert, as someone who spent his entire adult life thinking about the old Cold War, are we in a new Cold War? Oof. I mean, no. Okay. I think in the sense that, or if we are in a new Cold War, it is so new that the old Cold War doesn't offer a very good comparison. Because we're not talking about, I don't think. the kind of all-encompassing ideological divide that the old Cold War promised. Because when you look at it, we are looking at a great power struggle between the United States and China with Russia and potentially the Europeans and the Indians and the Brazilians and everybody else having a role to play. I would argue this is less a new Cold War than this could be a return to the multipolar world of the 18th or 19th century. And that's why for the Europeans, and this I'm going to end with a quote from Franz Josef Strauss, right, who in the 1960s said, right, that in the world that we live in, right, that no single European state, no matter its history, no matter its ambitions, can on its own seriously think that it can compete with continental powers like the United States, the Soviet Union at the time, or China. And I think this is the challenge for the Europeans and the challenge for the Germans is as they talk about trying to take on more responsibility is they need to think in much larger terms than their mere national borders. And that's going to be the big challenge. And that's got nothing to do with whether it's a Cold War, because whatever side they want to end up on, whoever's interests they want to advance, they're not going to be able to defend those interests as a series, as a fragmented continent. And even the Germans will find that it's very difficult to imagine acting in the world simply on their own. This was an insight that Adenauer recognized in 1945, when he realized that Germany needed to build up as a part of Europe rather than try once more to go its own way. This is an idea that Helmut Kohl, when he had the chance to push for German unification, he recognized that unification could only happen if Germany also promised that it would continue its work in Europe and continue its alliance with the United States. And so he recognized that Germany was stronger. Germany was pretty strong and pretty wealthy, but Germany was stronger if it had partners. And so for the Germans, for the Europeans, you know, to build a Europe that can act in the world and then partner with like-minded, I would argue, like-minded democratic states like the United States, right? That would be a really good thing. But we're not going to get there if we get locked in this idea of a fragmented Europe that somehow is expected to follow in the wake of one or the other of the big continental powers. So Adenauer's thought and the work of his heirs still relevant, still timely? I think so. Okay. There's a certain optimism to that. I think we'll end here for today. And we've been talking with Ronald J. Granieri about Ednauer's heiress, the CDU-CSU from detente to reunification. Thanks for talking with me today. Thank you, Yaja. It's been a great pleasure. And thanks to all of you for listening in. Please send us your comments and suggestions for this and future episodes. Please also subscribe to A Better Piece on your podcatcher of choice. And most importantly, tell a friend about the program so that we can continue to build this community for conversations like this one. This conversation is over, but we look forward to welcoming you again. Until next time, from the War Room, I'm Jadwiga Biskupska. And that concludes our program. Thank you for listening. The views expressed on this podcast reflect those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Army or the Department of War. Let us know what you think. Provide us your feedback, comments, or suggestions through our webpage at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. and have a great day.